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xororand writes "The initiative called 'Accelerated 3D on the web' has been formed by the Khronos consortium with the goal to define an open standard for 3D content on the web, using OpenGL and ECMAscript, as it was suggested by Mozilla developers. 'The Khronos(TM) Group today announced an initiative to create an open, royalty-free standard for bringing accelerated 3D graphics to the Web. In response to a proposal from Mozilla, Khronos has created an "Accelerated 3D on Web" working group that Mozilla has offered to chair. This royalty-free standard will be developed under the proven Khronos development process with a target of a first public release within 12 months.'
Unlike previous attempts to establish 3D standards for the web, this one might be actually successful due to the use of existing open standards, and the increasing performance of ECMAscript engines."

I've been trying to figure out how to get web pages to load slower. There are only so many things you can add to a page before you run out of ideas, and as cool as it is, the falling snow effect looks stupid 3 out of 12 months a year.

Yeah I know it has real potential for some serious implementations, but we all know that you're just going to have 3d rotating logs, 3d menus and other such junk more than anything else.

While that's true, I think we can expect most of the good websites to limit the use of 3D on crap... most good sites are pretty responsible with that kind of thing. Now the sites our friends and family might go to... oh my god, I don't even want to think of this combined with 3rd party Facebook apps!

Anyway, this could be really nice in AJAX-type apps... I'm thinking of things like iTunes album view, visualizers(?), touch screen stuff, interesting GUIs for Flickr-type apps... there are a lot of good appl

This is hinted at in the HTML5 [whatwg.org] spec. Vladimir Vukicevic has already created a 3D Firefox Add-on [mozilla.org] that extends <canvas> with an OpenGL ES context; and others are working on a javascript library that aims to make make Canvas 3D development easier [c3dl.org].

You can laugh at this, but I'm eagerly awaiting the day were all those flash-based games are replaced by javascript games using that 3D canvas.Imagine that ! No silly and unsecure plugin to download, a truely open standard available on smartphones as well as desktops, and fully integrated with the DOM content (i.e. can interect with the rest of the web page, unlike flash which is restrained to its sandbox).

Actually, I expect this will be something you have to enable from the get-go. OpenGL in emulation could bog down even a top of the line computer if advertisers do any sort of misuse.

I originally installed Flashblock on my older single-core 2.8ghz celeron because having a modest number of tabs (~8) with flash ads going would cause my CPU usage to hit 80%. That's enough to keep the fan spinning pretty high.

I seriously doubt that Microsoft will put that into the default configuration of IE11 or whatever version this function gets delivered in, it would reduce their ability to sell coding toolkits for the 3D function to the market.

No, whenever this is seen as a 'good' thing by the big browsers (IE, Safari, FF) the default will be to allow this junk, and most of the 'normal' people who use the inter-tubes dont know how to download a FireFox extension, much less probe the depths of Internet explorer's preferences

Get ready to download 65mb of textures before you can click "Download" on a 3D toolbar to start the search for your video card driver! The future is now! If you're lucky your browser won't crash halfway though.

I'm thinking more about the legitimate uses of this tech; real-time 3D data visualization and such. It's crappy to have to load a desktop app to do anything in this department, especially relatively simple stuff. With a ton of intranet apps being developed to run in the browser, why not add this capability?

With a ton of intranet apps being developed to run in the browser, why not add this capability?

Well, in a slight change of topic, one issue with adding this capability is security.

It seems this is basically a thin wrapper around OpenGL (ES). That means we'd be giving arbitrary code in web pages basically direct access to OpenGL drivers, which opens up an entire new world of potential exploits: OpenGL drivers are big and complicated, and have never really been put in such a position (typical OpenGL apps are programs you download and run, which anyhow already have access to your computer).

If you build it, they will come. I share the same frustration with computers too. I get what I'm thinking is a great computer (hardware wise) and then the OS comes so overbloated to render it equally as fast my 486SX computer running Windows 95. Thanks. For once can we evolve to makes things faster, not use all available resources that make inevitably slower.

I think that the reason why firefox takes more resources to run than early 90's operating systems might be evidence of the fact that having the browser do all might not be the best. (And my early 90's os was perfectly capable of browsing the internet via an early 90's browser, all for less resources than firefox is taking up right now.)

Havent you heard? The Browser is the OS now. This way the large vertically integrated software companies can deliver their entire panoply of junk software to us through the browser and we get to pay a monthly priviledge^H^H^H^H subscription for access.

Not sure how bad this is for the OSS movement however, creating the ever more complex rich user-interface environments is not the stuff of one guy in his mother's closet writing code - it takes real artists, human-interface studies, and more, to make the stu

I think that the reason why firefox takes more resources to run than early 90's operating systems might be evidence of the fact that having the browser do all might not be the best.

Funny. I'd rather have Firefox implement a Flash-like subsystem, which could reuse its existing scripting and rendering framework, than have something like Flash which has to essentially build that entire framework from the ground up... poorly.

Or: Firefox + 2D/3D rendering can't *possibly* be any worse than the shitpile that is

Erm shouldn't fancy stuff like 3d acceleration be handled by plug-ins not browsers? I don't even think putting ogg in the browser was a good idea!

Creating something as a Web standard does not mean browser makers have to incorporate it as part of the core browser. If you want a stripped down browser that needs a plug-in to implement more resource intensive Web standards, nobody is stopping you.

Erm shouldn't fancy stuff like 3d acceleration be handled by plug-ins not browsers?

Uh, why? Just because?

I mean, the browser already does accelerated 2D rendering in the form of CSS-decorated HTML. And SVG+Javascript covers quite a bit of the Flash playbook. So why not go all the way and give it the capability to do generalized, accelerated 2D and 3D rendering? We've already got the shitpile that is Flash... at least by embedding this capability in the browser itself, you get a standard implementation a

> So why not go all the way and give it the capability to do generalized, accelerated 2D and 3D rendering?

Because it would be easier for a 3D app vendor to wrap a browser around their 3D engine than the other way around. Much like how Intel got scared as 3D cards rocketed by their processors in capacitor density and so on, such that a Pentium core became something they might one day just tuck into the corner of their chips.

Because it would be easier for a 3D app vendor to wrap a browser around their 3D engine than the other way around.

Umm... and that solves the same problem, how, exactly? The whole point, here, is that there are a class of web applications that could really use 3D rendering, but don't have access to the necessary APIs. So you're going to have to expose some kind of API to the Javascript universe, and if you're doing that, you're most of the way to putting a 3D engine (and I use the term "engine" loosely...

Erm shouldn't fancy stuff like 3d acceleration be handled by plug-ins not browsers?

3D acceleration can be handled anywhere; what I don't see is why a "web standard" is needed for it. You need a web standard for description and behavior of particular content (e.g., things like HTML, or more relevant to 3D content, VRML or X3D), acceleration shouldn't need to be part of the standard at all, it should be part of the implementation tailored to the hardware and software (OS, etc.) environment of the implementati

I didn't think anything outside text should be used. Lynx for the win.

Seriously the line on what formats are natively supported will keep shifting. First gif/jpeg then png without plugins. Then theres SVG (do you need a plugin?) etc . As for a moving pictures format, once images were added I found it strange that a movie codec wasn't.

True that. I guess it can't be discounted completely even given past failures/shortcomings. It's at least an interesting idea. Who knows, maybe if it gets some proper support behind it, it might actually go somewhere.

Yeah, because standardizing web content has worked so very well thus far. This should take right off and just roll. No problems whatsoever. Yep.

Obviously there has been one particular company working hard to hold back Web standards. That said, between legal scrutiny of those actions and the slow erosion of their Web install share to both alternative browsers and alternative platforms (e.g. smartphones) standards are becoming both more important and more applied.

Indeed, indeed. There is a certain amount of necessity to it. Personally, I'm all for standardization as far as web content goes. It really would stand to benefit the masses.

One of the big problems, though, is getting said masses to go along with it. There're a certain number of individuals out there that just don't want to play nice. They want to do things their way, regardless of what "standards" the majorities want to enforce. The internet's a big place, and it's tough to get everyone in it to follow

The internet's a big place, and it's tough to get everyone in it to follow the rules.

Not really. Any of them that don't have overwhelming market share in a pertinent market are kept in line by the market, as in they lose money and install base when they break compatibility. All that really needs to be done is enforce current antitrust laws against any player who tries leveraging dominance in another market to undermine this process.

Man, I miss people asking for VRML galleries and stores. The same way I miss getting kicked in the head repeatedly.

I had the same reaction. And it was just SOOOOO successful last time we went down this road.

That being said, the hardware is about two orders of magnitude more powerful than it was in the 90s. I can now do 3D visualizations in Java that would have been difficult in C on dedicated hardware back then.

Even more bandwidth draining marketing weenie tools to make websites 'interactive'! Eleventy!

I'm highly confident that soon we will see a proliferation of meaningless uses of this technology to further anger the denizens of FaceBook (you broke my homepage) and turn every formerly useful information site into an impossible to navigate hash.

Clean web page design with usability studies and simplistic HTML+CSS works very well, just like what you're looking at here on Slashdot - do you really think that the onl

I think it's useful to develop an open web 3d standard, despite the dancing GIF animations it brings to mind. What I foresee is either MS or MS sock puppet(s) getting a seat at the table. Suddenly, "Open" ActiveX is the solution.

I'm not sure it'll give rise to "dancing gif" syndrome, but more a replacement for SVG. Then we get better graphics than downloaded compressed bitmaps, and the possibility of doing a lot more in the browser. That's especially important as the browser moves towards being the desktop.

Unfortunately, I see MS getting in there too, even if they're not interested in the technology - its a standard that isn't directX, oh noes - and just want to strangle it or implement their own 'mostly' compatible version with so

I don't think MS will "get in there". To win this one, all they have to do is wait. Web designers all over the world will continue to curse IE for not supporting the best new features, but they still won't be able to add it to their web site because it won't work for 90% of the world.

I think it's useful to develop an open web 3d standard, despite the dancing GIF animations it brings to mind. What I foresee is either MS or MS sock puppet(s) getting a seat at the table. Suddenly, "Open" ActiveX is the solution.

Umm, do you have any idea who the Khronos group is? It's Apple, Sun, Id, Creative, Sony, Intel, AMD/ATI, and NVIDIA among others. They make OpenGL and pretty much all of them have a vested interest in keeping the standards open and usable by everyone and NOT controlled by Microsoft. The main purpose behind Khronos these days is to provide a usable alternative to DirectX.

Sun? They're pretty late to the party, and we're not sure they're on board. But Apple? Creative? Nvidia? SONY?!?!?! You hold these guys up as pillars of openness?!?!?

We weren't discussing openness. We were discussing the possibility raised by the previous poster about making this standard into an MS controlled ActiveX based technology. Sony has a terrible record on openness in general, but they rarely if ever support closed technologies controlled by others, especially Microsoft. Sony also has a vested interest in some standards, such as OpenGL which they have been a good citizen with regard to.

What the hell have you been smoking that makes you believe that the makers/backers of itunes/ipod, BD+, pervertors of the CD standard have any interest in making things open and accessible to everyone?!?!

All of these companies have a history of promoting open standards for techn

This does not work that way. Microsoft sits in the consortium, then rips out the ideas and implements 90% of it incompatible under their own umbrella and nails everything they can grab with patents.

Then you have to wait at least 10 years until you get a half working standards implementation from them. Works that way every time. See CSS2, Dom Level2, SVG (which currently is named differently and works only in Silverlight in their 90% fully incompatible implementation), Windows Media 9 etc...The list of those

"Content" is logical, not physical, and therefore this statement is wrong. And the web isn't a 2d surface (or any other kind of surface), so even if the statement was true so far as it goes, it would still be irrelevant to whether there can be 3D content on the Web. And since the human visual system uses a pair of 2D sensors to synthesize a 3-dimensional model of the portion of the universe seen, its pretty clear that you can present as good of a presentation of 3D content as humans can deal with using via 2D images, provided you do it just right. And, of course, you can do 2D projections from a 3D model even with one 2D surface, with quite useful results (and, if you deliver the 3D model to the user agent, which then performs whatever requested manipulations the user wants, with a whole lot less latency than if the server had to generate 2D images from a 3D object model and send them over the wire in response to queries for different views of the same model from the same user agent.)

When we get holographic displays we'll have 3D content, but until then it's perspective, not 3D.

You're not being 'pedantic', you're being 'incorrect'. How do you think they get fancy effects like "being able to look at things from any angle"? It is actually 3D, even if it's rendered in 2D for display on the screen.

I, for one, do not welcome the 3D float-over advertisement overlords. It is bad enough to see reputable sites use simple 2D float-over ads on their pages, but full 3D might force me to go text only or completely skip sites that allow these shenanigans.

First prototype of the 3D web is already run at thousands of Opensim servers all around the globe. The 3D Web bears similarities to 2D Web; Users can follow links to teleport from a 3D world to another one. 3D Viewers are used to browse the 3D content on the servers.
Check it out here: IT giants back up open source 3D Web [cybertechnews.org].

Went to see Coraline last weekend. Good movie, but the best thing I can say about its use of 3D is that it didn't get in the way. Mostly.

All these idiots who keep pushing 3D media at us. WE DON'T WANT IT. It doesn't make anything "more real". Quite the opposite. Since you can never do it completely right with anything resembling current media, you end up with a lot of half-baked complications (the "foreground" objects in Coraline often look like cardboard cutouts) that make it that much harder to immerse yourself in the movie, the GUI, or whatever.

(When you invent a completely new medium in which 3D makes sense, like those "holodecks" on Star Trek, get back to us.)

And as for GUIs, they make interaction more complicated. The whole point of GUIs is to make interaction simpler. If I want to keep track of a lot of extraneous detail, I'll use a CLI.

I write hardware manuals for a living, and there are some people at our company who want us to start embedding 3D interactive models in the PDF versions of our manuals. If I thought this proposal was going to go anywhere (we don't even have enough resources to do more basic authoring easily) I'd be very noisily opposing it. Lots of extra work, all to make using our manuals a little more difficult. No thanks.

..an automatic way - an option- for webpages (with some "standards" sort of code) to automatically redirect-based on the viewers settings- to the opposite of 3D live motion spinning and whatnot full flash full bloat page, to the low res/print this page version. It is really bogus when all you want is the text, but you have to load the full bloat version *just* to find the "print this article" link. That sort of defeats the purpose. Images off and noscript and ABP helps, but that still isn't enough.

If I remember my history, HTML started as a way to store linked information. Then it was badly hacked to be a way to poorly layout documents. Then java script was stapled onto it. Then the whole mess was turned into the kluge that is ajax. Now someone's trying to duct tape 3-D onto that.

I for one look forward to a day when the web is a more dynamic environment, where information is presented more fluidly instead relying on the old metaphor of static published pages, but I can't believe this is a sane way forward. It seems like instead of looking for a better way to present information they're just duct taping crap onto the same old model. Kind of like achieving flight by strapping a rocket motor to horse drawn carriage.

There's a lot of duct tape crap, I'll admit. But the current system has a lot of pretty solid ideas and systems that work well, too. For example, HTTP, and the general stateless nature of the web works great. Proxies, and caching, and other supporting technologies are actually pretty good or at least work really well.

Ajax sucks and is kludgey. But really I don't even notice, even though I code with it every day. That's because I've got it all abstracted away into super easy to use libraries. Lots of it

If I would start from scratch, I probably would kill the entire http post get aspects and would make everything get only with unlimited length of the get content!

Why they even made this distinction is beyound me!Besides that I would add subsegment isolation to the dom so that there is a base for a real component set. I would probably stay on javascript for the dynamic binding, but would start off with EcmaScript 4 so that real inheritance and namespaces are added! (Tell me what you will the current state of

With respect, I disagree. People have a lot of definitions for REST, but I don't think yours is totally accurate. REST uses all of the HTTP methods. The workarounds for PUT and DELETE are because of specific servers not supporting them.

Session cookies do not break the REST model. Even when people use the url to pass state, it doesn't contain the state itself, just an id (plenty of room for that). And REST has the bonus of gracefully accommodating people like me (and probably you) who hack the url when the a

What is really needed is a high-level format for storing 3D models, with easy software for content creation and importing models from existing 3D modelers. There have been attempts to do this before, VRML and Adobe's acrobat reader both support 3D. Nobody really uses it outside of a few specialized fields.

There is a high level format like the one you speak of. COLLADA [wikipedia.org] another open standard managed by the Khronos group. Many 3D authoring applications and game engines support this format, and I would not be at all surprised if they chose COLLADA as the format for transferring geometry in this new 3D web standard.

COLLADA is pretty great, though it's pretty tough to generate. I always end up using Blender or SketchUp to get a rough idea of what the tree is going to look like before I write the code (seems to be more efficient than wading through the docs).

Also, COLLADA does a lot more than represent 3D models...

You probably already know this, but for those who don't: COLLADA is also the format used for models in Google Earth.

This has nothing to do with markup (VRML, x3D, etc). It is about the browser exposing an opengl API to javascript.

According to TFA, it's Mozilla that is proposing building the functionality into a browser (but it could be any other ecmascript container). Since Mozilla is contributing to the standard (and started the initiative), we should expect this to absorb Canvas:3D (i.e., this is not a redundancy).

This standardization is a Good Thing. Everyone's concerns about advertisers abusing this should be directed towards advertisers, not this totally useful idea. Also, noscript rocks.

To all who think javascript just sucks, you don't know how to use it. Stop using it like it's C.

And if it replaces that leaky, closed, insecure, inaccessible, non-semantic and patent-encumbered plugin that almost killed the Web, awesome. With any luck, it'll kill DirectX too.

Anyone remember 3DML (http://www.flatland.com/ [flatland.com]), at one point in time it got really big, was easier to use than VRML then dropped off the face of the earth due to lack of updates to the language and the Rover plugin, etc. Of course, 3DML has been over taken by the much more advanced 3DMLW (http://www.3dmlw.com/ [3dmlw.com]) -- no relation to Flatland's version. So, really, is this anything new; I don't think so?!